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Aka of Gilbertstown
Aka of Gilbertstown is a naturalized citizen of Akaku, a remote, pacific-island-inspired micronation on the eastern side of the pillar of clouds. She is currently a fifth-level human cyborg warlock traveling with her great-uncle, Thelonius, and her long-lost twin sister, Serahi. Character Details Appearance Aka is identical to her sister, Serahi: she has dark hair, dark tan skin and green eyes, and she is 18 years old and 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing in at 160 lbs. The main difference in appearance between the twins is Aka's mechanical left hand, which she usually covers in a bright red/pink glove that looks like an oven mitt. Personality Probably more than anything else, Aka likes to avoid being tied down to a fixed role, dodging out of as much work and education as possible as a child to play on the streets instead, then wandering across Akaku doing odd jobs to avoid being inducted into a guild, and, finally, leaving Akaku altogether in an effort to shake off some creepy paranormal entity that keeps gifting her with cool powers. Her morality is a little skewed from the normal, since she takes neither laws nor authority seriously. Even though she seems to make decisions based on what would be the most personally entertaining, she also has well-concealed serious moments when she decides to take a blatantly moral or amoral path if it benefits herself or those she feels a connection to. Equipment and Combat Style Despite primarily having spellcasting abilities, Aka prefers to use as many of her own skills as she can in combat, so she tends to use weaponry before she resorts to using the more arcane "gifts" her patron has given her. The same goes for her robotic hand, which would make a fairly good weapon but is typically used to hold a shield instead. Aka's primary tools and equipment are a cuirass and helmet made in Gilbertstown by a family friend, a buckler, and a magical, robotic-looking rapier that admittedly is granted by her patron. She also has a disguise kit containing, among other things, a Groucho Marx glasses-and-moustache kit that she has a deep emotional attachement to. History Pre-Adventure Life Aka and Serahi were both born on one of the western islands to a couple involved in the blacksmithing industry. Not long after the twins were born, the family emigrated to Akaku, tragically misplacing infant Serahi during a layover on Agarin. Aside from this loss, the family enjoyed good fortune and eventually rose to administrative levels in the local blacksmith's guild. The matter of the missing daughter was not brought up often, leaving Aka quite uncertain on the matter (Thelonius currently has her under the impression that she did not lose a twin sister on the trip, but rather a twin cat or, possibly, a teddy bear). During early childhood, Aka integrated seamlessly with the people of Akaku, even taking a local bisyllabic nickname for general use in place of her longer, foreign proper name. She felt a great connection to the port city of Gilbertstown, to the colorful dress of the people from other villages, to her friends that she played with on the streets, to the lore of intermingled nature and technology peculiar to the island. Even the customs of the smaller towns felt natural to her, from the jabbering dialect of the Mahiki forest to the spire miners' ingrained performance of safety procedures. It was certainly more dear to her than the blacksmithing profession she had lined up, and she shirked her duties and training whenever possible to run across the town with her gang of urchins and other children. Upon entering adolescence, the same excuses stopped carrying as much weight with her parents and other members of the guild, so Aka volunteered to act as a courier and representative to the other communities on Akaku. Not only did this keep her out of a respectable career, it also gave her the chance to explore and live for months at a time in completely different environments, each one feeling like home to her. She continued this lifestyle until her first contact with her warlock patron, which led her to leave Akaku within a few months. Early Adventures Current Adventures First Session While on a SkyCorp passenger ship bound for Tenrai from Agarin, Aka looked into an open stateroom and was held up by a paladin of the Order of Unyielding Light (Colonel "Mustard" Murgatroid) as a suspect in the murder of another passenger, the bloodthirsty ex-pirate Cyrus "Boddy" von Hardt. Also in the room were Aka's great-uncle Thelonius, whom she did not recognize at first, and the recently deceased buccaneer. Aka managed to infuriate Mustard over the course of the night by denying that she had been present in the room earlier, attempting to steal his holy symbol, stealing his holy symbol and impersonating a member of his order. As the mystery continued, several suspects were interviewed: Randolph White, a historian who had been working with von Hardt; White's dwarf assistant, Scori Stone; Lu-Xian Lapis, a sketchy dragonborn bravo who lied in his interview; Naku Ocher, the ship's half-orc chef; and Almarel Jet, an elvish necromancer-in-training bound for Sulumbra. No one realized that (one) of the true murderers, Serahi ("Scarlet") of Agarin, had slipped away and avoided detection thanks to her close likeness to Aka. Events drew toward a close with the murder of Randolph White and attempts upon both Serahi and the Colonel by an invisible assassin. During the inevitable chase that resulted, Aka ran into her double hiding in her room, ran around some more and eventually gathered with the other plot-essential characters as Serahi, Thelonius and Mustard brought down the killer and discovered her to be a member of one of the mobs in Agarin and Tenrai. After Serahi dispatched the rival gangster, she and Aka were both interrogated, at which point Aka realized her relation to Thelonius but not to Serahi. All three PCs disembarked and hung around together on Tenrai, happening to land at the yearly gathering known as the Court of Five Petals and introducing themselves to the sumo-wrestling representatives of one of the island's five cities. Session 2 The three travelers, deciding to remain as a unit for a while (because having a double to blame can be useful) attended the Court of Five Petals, listening to the island's leaders discussing the problems they needed help with and witnessing an appearance by the dryad living in Tenrai's central tree. At the conclusion of the summit, they debated between providing some mercenary ghostbusting services and helping a concerned father break up his daughter's romance. The votes for gravedigging had it, and the three joined the entourage of the high priestess in charge of Shiwaru, the graveyard-town. On their first night there, Aka and Serahi both crit-failed a perception role, imagining a horde of zombies and triggering a false alarm. Thelonius investigated the same place and found an ornate shortsword, which Aka made a clumsy attempt to "borrow" that night for the sake of her own amusement. In the morning, the trio set out on their main mission: clearing out some undead from a particularly ancient mausoleum so that the gravedigger society could read the prophecy inscribed on the inner chamber's walls. In the resulting conflict, Aka was aged ten years by a ghost, Serahi was posessed, Aka and Serahi stabbed each other, and Thelonius found a cool sword with a shapeshifting invisibility sheath. That night, aware that something unpleasant had happened to her in the crypt, Aka had direct contact with her patron for the first time. An unseen, voice-modulated entity addressed her in a blank white dreamscape, offering to reverse the aging effects in exchange for permission to give Aka a robotic arm that he/she/it could control. Greatly disturbed by the over-the-top creepiness of her "benefactor", Aka promised to sleep on the matter and instead spent the next day (and all of her wages) to procure the benefits of a Scroll of Greater Restoration from the graveyard's library, reversing the aging effect by her own means and avoiding increased reliance on her patron. Session 3 After the job in Shiwaru, Serahi was called to Kinmura to aid her "family" (i.e., the mafia clan that adopted her) for a while, and Thelonius and Aka went north to Raigawa to follow another job lead they had. Although a tattered umbrella blew across their path at one point, they otherwise continued onwards without incident, and entered the Golden Blade Inn for their evening meal. Upon overhearing the location of an affair that sounded like it might line up with their intended mission (causing a breakup between the mayor of Kyonaka's daughter and her bravo boyfriend), the two relatives ventured to another inn, stopping only to buy a couple potions off of a dwarf alchemist who inadvently exhaled lightning at one point. While Aka scanned the crowd for likely people, Thelonius found a gang of tipsy drug dealers, impersonated a client, and then ran off with a bag of their distilled essence of the plain of positive energy, leading them on a chase around the inn (and giving Aka opportunity to relieve two of them of their valuables). After that encounter, Aka and Thelonius returned briefly to the Golden Blade, where they tried to dress Thelonius as an old woman to prevent further conflict with the local punks before returning to the second inn to investigate a couple that looked like it could be their actual target. Sure enough, the drunk boring another client with trumped-up tales of his adventures turned out to be the bravo Leon, and the young woman watching the sad spectacle lovingly from across the room was the Kyonakan mayor's daughter, Subaru. The monk and warlock mercenary team put their plan into action as follows: First, Aka put a hex on Leon, crimping all Charisma checks for the next several hours, while Thelonius sloshed him with his own drink "by accident" and then laced his replacement with some of the stock purloined from the dealers. Before too much more could be done in the common room, Subaru took the stoned inebriate upstairs, interrupting his now blatantly-obvious tall tales. From outside their window, Aka overheard an argument between the couple, and she pushed the tensions along by making loud and disruptive noises using minor illusion for the next four hours. Going to bed after keeping the targets awake for half the night, Aka ran into two drunk drug dealers checking her room for Thelonius and their stolen goods (failing to find him where he was trying to sleep under the bed). On the pretense of guiding them back to their own room, Aka lead them to the door of the room where Leon and Subaru had just fallen asleep. Unfortunately, the door was looked, but the confused dealer hammered on the door and shouted until a furious Leon came out. Sure enough, the two angry winesops got into an argument, which turned into a full-blown fist-fight with Aka's serreptitious intervention. Gratifyingly, the punk proved to be more than a match for the self-professed dragonslayer, flooring him within seconds. Her night's work done, Aka returned to her room with the intention of sleeping until midday. The rest was far from uneventful, though - Aka found herself on a color-faded hilltop, and, sure enough, was approached by her patron once more. Rather than acting as a greasy mafioso, though, the mechanical-sounding speaker affected a more distinguished accent and led with apologies and excuses for the approach it had tried last time. Agreeing to talk, Aka was unable to find out much about this entity beyond two facts: first, it was accustomed to working with hierarchal machines and elves with little thought of disobeying, and second, it used to be known as the greatest purveyor of information in the universe. Furthermore, it had a more agreeable offer this time around: if Aka would hide a golden jar located in the Aonuma swamp so that no one could ever find it and potentially open its lid to release "bad things", it agreed to come clean with Aka about the nature of the golden jar, the bad things, and its intentions in having her hide it. Finally, as a gesture of good faith, it informed Aka that Serahi was, indeed, her twin. Upon waking from her conference, Aka heard some crashes from the common room below and, rushing to the scene, found Thelonius taking on seven members of the drug gang they had met last night. Although Subaru and Leon were present but initially uninvolved, Aka and Thelonius were unable to both fight and deter the mostly-disgraced bravo from starting a rematch with the dealer who had knocked him out in the hallway the night before. Just when it looked like the boor might down his man and earn some redemption, Aka took down the last pair of thugs at the bar and Thelonius crossed the room for a one-liner-aided kill steal, knocking out Leon's opponent and then kicking the enraged fighter's mace across the room when he looked like he was going to draw it. This sent the frustrated boyfriend packing, and it was the simplest of matters afterward to escort Subaru back to her father in Kyonaka, although Aka found that her equipment doesn't work well underwater in a skirmish on the way back. When they arrived the next day, Takeda, the mayor, was overjoyed to see his daughter and presented the adventurers with ten gold apiece as well as a magical ring. Aka's net profit for the two-and-a-half days since leaving Kyonaka was 32 gp 2 sp, a magic ring, a bag of illegal drugs, a draught of dragon's bile and a few pieces of useful information. Category:Player Characters